Develop Reference

Is it a good practice to keep a Socket connection open for reading?

I am trying to build an Android IM, since users may have new messages from others, should I keeps the TCP connection open and keep reading data from it? e.g.
while(!shutdown) {
int count = socketChannel.read(buffer);
// do something with buffer
}

This depends on your implementation. If you're using blocked sockets then you wouldn't want to do this. It would mean that if you have more than one client connecting to the server they would block all other clients from connecting to that server socket.
What you could do is have a server socket running consistently (as you normally would) and then to connect to it with a client socket to check and receive any new messages that have arrived. Once you've received your message you can close the socket. This could be performed every n seconds.
The other option is to use non-blocked socket connections and always keep them open but this could lead to issues if you have many clients.

ObjectInputStream's readObject() freezes after Client Socket connection is killed

I have following Socket server's code that reads stream from connected Socket.
try
{
ObjectInputStream in = new ObjectInputStream(client.getInputStream());
int count = 10;
while(count>0)
{
String msg = in.readObject().toString(); //Stucks here if this client is lost.
System.out.println("Client Says : "+msg);
count--;
}
in.close();
client.close();
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
ex.printStackTrace();
}
And I have a Client program, that connects with this server, sends some string every second for 10 times, and server reads from the socket for 10 times and prints the message, but if in between I kill the Client program, the Server freezes in between instead of throwing any exception or anything.
How can I detect this freeze condition? and make this loop iterate infinitely and print whatever client sends until connection is active and stable?

The problem is that the server side of the socket has no way of knowing that the client connection closed because the client code terminates without calling .close() on the client side of the socket, and therefore never sends the TCP FIN signal.
One possible way of fixing this would be to create a new Watcher thread that just periodically inspects the socket to see if it is still active. The problem with that approach is that the isConnected() on the Socket will not work for the same reason stated above so the only real way to inspect the connection is to attempt to write to it. However, this may cause random garbage to be sent to a potentially listening client.
Other options would be to implement some type of keep-alive protocol that the client should agree to (i.e., send keep-alive bits every so often so the Watcher has something to look for). You could also just move to the java.nio approach, which I believe does a better job at dealing with these conditions.
This thread is old, but provides more detail: http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t541628-sockets-checking-for-dropped-connections-and-close.html.

ObjectInputStream.readObject() hangs forever during the process of socket communication

I have encountered a problem of socket communication on linux system, the communication process is like below: client send a message to ask the server to do a compute task, and wait for the result message from server after the task completes.
But the client would hangs up to wait for the result message if the task costs a long time such as about 40 minutes even though from the server side, the result message has been written to the socket to respond to the client, but it could normally receive the result message if the task costs little time, such as one minute. Additionally, this problem only happens on customer environment, the communication process behaves normally in our testing environment.
I have suspected the cause to this problem is the default timeout value of socket is different between customer environment and testing environment, but the follow values are identical on these two environment, and both Client and server.
getSoTimeout:0
getReceiveBufferSize:43690
getSendBufferSize:8192
getSoLinger:-1
getTrafficClass:0
getKeepAlive:false
getTcpNoDelay:false
the codes on CLient are like:
Message msg = null;
ObjectInputStream in = client.getClient().getInputStream();
//if no message readObject() will hang here
while ( true ) {
try {
Object recObject = in.readObject();
System.out.println("Client received msg.");
msg = (Message)recObject;
return msg;
}catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
return null;
}
}
the codes on server are like,
ObjectOutputStream socketOutStream = getSocketOutputStream();
try {
MessageJobComplete msgJobComplete = new MessageJobComplete(reportFile, outputFile );
socketOutStream.writeObject(msgJobComplete);
}catch(Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
in order to solve this problem, i have added the flush and reset method, but the problem still exists:
ObjectOutputStream socketOutStream = getSocketOutputStream();
try {
MessageJobComplete msgJobComplete = new MessageJobComplete(reportFile, outputFile );
socketOutStream.flush();
logger.debug("AbstractJob#reply to the socket");
socketOutStream.writeObject(msgJobComplete);
socketOutStream.reset();
socketOutStream.flush();
logger.debug("AbstractJob#after Flush Reply");
}catch(Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
logger.error("Exception when sending MessageJobComplete."+e.getMessage());
}
so do anyone knows what the next steps i should do to solve this problem.
I guess the cause is the environment setting, but I do not know what the environment factors would affect the socket communication?
And the socket using the Tcp/Ip protocal to communicate, the problem is related with the long time task, so what values about tcp would affect the timeout of socket communication?
After my analysis about the logs, i found after the message are written to the socket, there were no exceptions are thrown/caught. But always after 15 minutes, there are exceptions in the objectInputStream.readObject() codes snippet of Server Side which is used to accept the request from client. However, socket.getSoTimeout value is 0, so it is very strange that the a Timed out Exception was thrown.
{2012-01-09 17:44:13,908} ERROR java.net.SocketException: Connection timed out
at java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0(Native Method)
at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:146)
at sun.security.ssl.InputRecord.readFully(InputRecord.java:312)
at sun.security.ssl.InputRecord.read(InputRecord.java:350)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:809)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readDataRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:766)
at sun.security.ssl.AppInputStream.read(AppInputStream.java:94)
at sun.security.ssl.AppInputStream.read(AppInputStream.java:69)
at java.io.ObjectInputStream$PeekInputStream.peek(ObjectInputStream.java:2265)
at java.io.ObjectInputStream$BlockDataInputStream.peek(ObjectInputStream.java:2558)
at java.io.ObjectInputStream$BlockDataInputStream.peekByte(ObjectInputStream.java:2568)
at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject0(ObjectInputStream.java:1314)
at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject(ObjectInputStream.java:368)
so why the Connection Timed out exceptions are thrown?

This problem is solved. using the tcpdump to capture the messages flows. I have found that while in the application level, ObjectOutputStream.writeObject() method was invoked, in the tcp level, many times [TCP ReTransmission] were found.
So, I concluded that the connection is possibly be dead, although using the netstat -an command the tcp connection state still was ESTABLISHED.
So I wrote a testing application to periodically sent Testing messages as the heart-beating messages from the Server. Then this problem disappeared.

The read() methods of java.io.InputStream are blocking calls., which means they wait "forever" if they are called when there is no data in the stream to read.
This is completely expected behaviour and as per the published contract in javadoc if the server does not respond.
If you want a non-blocking read, use the java.nio.* classes.

Java SocketChannel doesn't detect disconnection?

I have a socket running, using selectors. I am trying to check to see if my socket is connected to the server or not.
Boolean connected = _channel.isConnected();
and it always returns true. I turned off Airport (internet connection) on my computer, and when i check to see if the socket is connected or not, it still returns true.
Any idea why?
I try to write data to the server every 3 seconds, and it still doesn't change the state of my socket to disconnected.

Usually if you turn off OS level networking, writes to socket should throw exceptions, so you know the connection is broken.
However more generally, we cann't be sure if a packet is delivered. In java (probably C too), there is no way to check if a packet is ACK'ed.
Even if we can check TCP ACKs, it doesn't guarantee that the server received or processed the packet. It only means that the target machine received the packet and buffered it in memory. Many things can go wrong after that.
So if you really want to sure, you can't rely on transport protocol. You must have application level ACK, that is, the server application writes back an ACK message after it received and processed a message from client.
From client point of view, it writes a message to server, then tries to read ACK from server. If it gets it, it can be certain that its message is received and processed. If it fails to get ACK, well, it has no idea what has happened. Empirically, most likely TCP failed. Next possiblity is that server crashed. It's also possible that everything went OK, except the ACK couldn't reach the client.

A socket channel can be connected by invoking its connect method; once connected, a socket channel remains connected until it is closed.
The channel is not closed when the server is not available anymore, due to a broken physical connection or a server failure. So once a connection has been established, isConnected() will be returning true until you close the channel on your side.
If you want to check, if the server is still available, send a byte to the sockets outputstream. If you get an Exception, then the server is unavailable (connection lost).
Edit
for EJP - some code to test and reconsider your comment and answer:
public class ChannelTest {
public static void main(String[] args) throws UnknownHostException, IOException {
Socket google = new Socket(InetAddress.getByName("www.google.com"), 80);
SocketChannel channel = SocketChannel.open(google.getRemoteSocketAddress());
System.out.println(channel.isConnected());
channel.close();
System.out.println(channel.isConnected());
}
}
Output on my machine is
true
false

isConnected() tells you whether you have connected the channel object, which you have, and it's not specified to return false after you close it, although apparently it does: see Andreas's answer. It's not there to tell you whether the underlying connection is still there. You can only tell that by using it: -1 from a read, or an exception, tells you that.

PDA loses TCP connection to ServerSocket in Suspend Mode

I'm implementing a java TCP/IP Server using ServerSocket to accept messages from clients via network sockets.
Works fine, except for clients on PDAs (a WIFI barcode scanner).
If I have a connection between server and pda - and the pda goues into suspend (standby) after some idle time - then there will be problems with the connection.
When the pda wakes up again, I can observer in a tcp monitor, that a second connection with a different port is established, but the old one remains established too:
localhost:2000 remotehost:4899 ESTABLISHED (first connection)
localhost:2000 remotehost:4890 ESTABLISHED (connection after wakeup)
And now communication doesn't work, as the client now uses the new connection, but the server still listens at the old one - so the server doesn't receive the messages. But when the server sends a message to the client he realizes the problem (receives a SocketException: Connection reset. The server then uses the new connection and all the messages which have been send in the meantime by the client will be received at a single blow!
So I first realize the network problems, when the server tries to send a message - but in the meantime there are no exceptions or anything. How can I properly react to this problem - so that the new connection is used, as soon as it is established (and the old one closed)?

From your description I guess that the server is structured like this:
server_loop
{
client_socket = server_socket.accept()
TalkToClientUntilConnectionCloses(client_socket)
}
I'd change it to process incoming connections and established connections in parallel. The simplest approach (from the implementation point of view) is to start a new thread for each client. It is not a good approach in general (it has poor scalability), but if you don't expect a lot of clients and can afford it, just change the server like this:
server_loop
{
client_socket = server_socket.accept()
StartClientThread(client_socket)
}
As a bonus, you get an ability to handle multiple clients simultaneously (and all the troubles attached too).

It sounds like the major issue is that you want the server to realize and drop the old connections as they become stale.
Have you considered setting a timeout on the connection on the server-side socket (the connection Socket, not the ServerSocket) so you can close/drop it after a certain period? Perhaps after the SO_TIMEOUT expires on the Socket, you could test it with an echo/keepalive command to verify that the connection is still good.